AN EXPLORATION OF THE TEACHER’S PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS: THE EFFECTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE INSTRUCTORS’ MAJORS ON THEIR ORIENTATIONS TOWARD TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION

This study seeks to examine how teachers’ educational background (those who have educated in TEFL in comparison to those who have educated in Literature) may influence their beliefs and attitudes on language learning, teaching and the teaching methods they apply in their classes. On a general basis, depending on teachers’ opinion, learning process might be seen as behavioristic, inductive, interactive or cooperative; teaching might be seen as structural, functional, interactional, or task-based; finally, reading comprehension might be seen as practice, product, process, or social process. Though it is not within the scope of the present study to find how each one of these teaching and learning processes might correspond to the teachers’ beliefs, the main argument of the study is that the teacher’s own educational background has a strong influence on the application of different approaches to teaching reading comprehension courses. The results indicated that the relationship between the teacher’s educational background and his or her opinion about the processes of learning and teaching in the classroom was neither correlated nor significant. Anyhow, the teacher’s educational background was found to have a strong effect on the method s/he applies in his Reading Comprehension classes.